{"id":12409,"date":"2022-03-11T10:58:55","date_gmt":"2022-03-11T15:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=12409"},"modified":"2022-03-11T11:13:20","modified_gmt":"2022-03-11T16:13:20","slug":"info-war-peace-theories-turning-to-ashes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/03\/11\/info-war-peace-theories-turning-to-ashes\/","title":{"rendered":"Info war & peace, theories turning to ashes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is being cross-posted (in modified form) from UKR-TAZ<\/a>, where it is part of a series examining the Russian invasion of Ukraine. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The invasion of Ukraine continues to horrify, with casualties mounting and humanitarian corridors failing to materialize. But one of its more interesting dimensions, from the perspective of media and cultural theory, is the role of information and cyber warfare<\/a>. The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel provides a good synopsis<\/a> of the ways in which Ukraine has so far been “winning” the information war, but argues that it’s far from over. Others are less circumspect<\/a>, and some, like Meduza’s Maxim Trudolyubov<\/a>, argue that Russia lost it at the very outset, just by starting the war. The depravity of Russian disinformation, as Joanna Szostek argues<\/a>, seems to know no bounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter Pomerantsev has cautioned,<\/a> however, that we need to be careful with our terms here. The very notion of “information war,” he argues, may serve disinformational goals, in that it \u201creinforc[es] a world view the Kremlin wants\u2014that all information is just manipulation.” To put this into a broader scholarly context, all reality may be “socially constructed,” all efforts to shape and know it simply forms of a Nietzschean “will to power,” but not all are equally <\/em>durable, desirable, or ethically and morally satisfying. Some constructs are more worth pursuing than others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Pomerantsev notes, \u201cSure the Ukrainian army do all sort of psy-ops to survive. But Ze[lensky] is treating people as equals, trying to engage and inspire them\u2014that\u2019s not \u2018information war\u2019. It\u2019s the opposite.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s videos<\/a> are certainly one of the data points that will be studied for years after this invasion is over. Where my initial sense about his election had been somewhat skeptical<\/a>, seeing it as an instance of politics as reality-TV (and reality-FB<\/a>), it’s clear to everyone that Zelensky has risen to the role of a genuine “reality president,” where reality is not in quotation marks but actually breaks into and challenges viewers’ mediated images of a war taking place far away. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ze’s videos reflecting a kind of incontrovertibility: this olive-green fatigued everyman-turned-war-hero<\/a> is speaking defiantly from a bunker, a presidential office, and outdoors in front of recognized buildings in a city being slowly surrounded and intermittently bombarded. He is addressing us directly — Europeans<\/a>, Jews<\/a>, Ukrainians, Russians<\/a>, and others — to unite for a cause we understand: the defense against a hyper-militarized, fascistic<\/a> aggressor, of people trying to live normal lives in the place they know as their homeland. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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